Stop data from walking out the door with departing employees
Mimecast Incydr helps security leaders proactively detect data exfiltration, automatically contain incidents, and reduce associated insider risk costs
By The Mimecast Cyber Insights Blog Team ·
Key Points
Eight in ten security leaders say departing employees take valuable IP, yet most monitoring only switches on after notice is given, which is far too late for sudden resignations.
Mimecast Incydr provides continuous, policy-free visibility into untrusted data movement across endpoint, cloud, browser, USB, personal email, and shadow AI tools from day one.
Through integrations with Workday, BambooHR, SuccessFactors, UKG, and others, flagging an employee as departing auto-watchlists them and tightens adaptive controls while temporary allow with self-reporting lets legitimate work continue.
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Eight in ten security leaders admit departing employees take valuable IP when they leave. Ponemon now puts the average annual cost of insider risk at $19.5 million. It takes 81 days on average to detect and contain an insider incident.
And in most organizations, nothing about the security stack changes the moment an employee gives notice. Most departing employee investigations are reactive, and without two weeks’ notice, many insider risk management tools simply wouldn’t have any insights.
The departure window is the highest-risk moment in the employee lifecycle and the least monitored. Source code, customer lists, and deal pipelines move to personal cloud and email, USB drives, or social apps with very little effort. The investigation almost always starts after the data is gone. Most CISOs are now being asked three questions by their board, their general counsel, and their head of HR:
Can you see the full window?
Can you automate controls when HR signals risk?
Can you produce evidence fast enough to act on it?
With Mimecast Incydr, that work is achievable in just 30 days.
Can you see the full departing employee window?
Incydr automatically tracks untrusted data movement, from day one, ideal for sudden departures or unannounced reduction in force (RIF) where security teams need to understand if sensitive data left with a departing employee.
Most organizations cannot answer “what did Jane Doe move in her last weeks at the company?” because the visibility was only turned on after the resignation. Policy-driven, content-tagging-based DLP requires an investigator to know what to look for, write a policy, deploy it, and wait. The time before the resignation is not in the system.
Incydr inverts that. Continuous monitoring of untrusted data movement on endpoint, cloud, browser, and removable media is the default state of the product, with no policies and no content tagging required. When an employee resigns without notice, is terminated same-day, or is included in an RIF, the activity trail already exists. Coverage extends to the channels traditional DLP misses: USB, AirDrop, personal Gmail and Drive, browser uploads to social apps, and even uploads or pastes to shadow AI tools. Departure-specific risk indicators flag the bulk-download and personal-email-forwarding patterns that often appear weeks before HR receives an offboarding signal.
“When someone gives their two weeks, I need to know immediately what they have been doing with our data. Right now, I have to ask IT, and they tell me they can check email but that is it.” – VP HR, Professional Services (Incydr customer)
Can you automate controls for departing employees when HR signals risk?
Visibility without action is just a faster investigation. The second step closes the loop between HR and security, so controls change automatically when departure is confirmed. Incydr's HCM integrations connect directly to Workday, BambooHR, SuccessFactors, UKG, Jira, and Mimecast. When HR marks an employee as departing, the user is automatically watchlisted, and adaptive controls can be tightened so no data is sent to untrusted destinations.
Legitimate work continues. Temporary allow with self-reporting gives the employee a controlled way to move final deliverables, with a full audit trail protecting both parties. For high-risk scenarios (same-day terminations, hostile departures), CrowdStrike, SentinelOne, Microsoft Entra, and Okta integrations enable one-click endpoint containment and access revocation.
Can you produce evidence fast enough to act on it?
A typical departing-employee case pulls signals from multiple consoles, correlates them by hand, and produces a forensic narrative days later. By the time Legal or HR has something to act on, the employee has been gone two weeks. Incydr's user timeline gives an analyst a chronological view of every file event for any user, with source-and-destination context and a risk score. Customers can use the built-in Mihra investigation or MCP Server integration to quickly triage and compile an executive ready report. An analyst can ask “give me a 90-day timeline for Jane Doe, exfiltration events only” and get the evidence package back in seconds. The output is a case file: timeline, file events, pasted browser content, source and destination metadata, and risk scoring as a single artifact HR and Legal can act on, without translation.
Closing the departing employees gap starts with an Incydr Proof of Value
Week 1. Endpoint and browser agent deployed. HCM integration configured. Departing-employee watchlist live, populated automatically from HR. First file movement events surface inside the first hour.
Week 2. Behavioral patterns become visible. Departure-specific risk indicators flag the highest-risk users in the pilot population. Adaptive controls like blocking tested.
Weeks 3 to 4. Utilize agentic AI through MCP server integration or Mihra investigation agent to compile an end-to-end departing-employee case for HR as an evidence package.
Day 30. Evidence, controls, a defensible governance narrative for the board, insights into potentially departing employees, and a simplified workflow between security and HR for cases and alerting.
A 30-day Proof of Value scoped to 50-100 users in a high-turnover department produces a usable picture in week one. By day 30, you have evidence, controls, and a governance story for the board.
Close the gap in 30 days
A 30-day Proof of Value scoped to 50-100 users in a high-turnover department produces a usable picture in week one. By day 30, you have evidence, controls, and a governance story for the board.
